Launch of the European Smart Anything Everywhere (SAE) Initiative

SAE is supporting product and service innovation through digital technologies. Clustered in four projects with a total budget of 25M€, 23 of Europe’s leading competence centres in the components and systems value chain across 11 Member States will start from January 2015 to support 100 user-supplier experiments with 200 SMEs and mid-caps. Currently, Smart Anything Everywhere constitutes projects selected under ICT1 and ICT2 of Work Programme 2014/15. EPoSS is represented in this initiative through the Innovation Action SMARTER-SI: Smarter Access to Manufacturing for Systems Integration

Smart phones, smart watches or smart TVs are just a few of the new products that are entering our daily lives. The functionalities of more and more objects are increased by digital components hidden inside. For instance, smart offices can turn off the lights when nobody is in the office, or a car can break automatically when it notices an obstacle. As an answer to these new changes, the European Commission proposed the creation of a ‘Smart Anything Everywhere’ (SAE) Initiative.

The core of the initiative is the networks of competence centres, usually research technology organisations (RTOs) or technology transfer-oriented university institutes who cluster a wide spectrum of technical and application knowledge to support innovation.

The ecosystems built under these initiatives are based on collaboration between researchers, large industries and SMEs which will help to transfer knowledge and resources available to a much wider group of companies. SMEs and middle size companies can experiment with new technologies, try them out in their processes and work together with the suppliers of the technology to adapt it to their specific needs.

A first group of four Innovation Actions are combining efforts under the SAE initiative. The combined 25M€ funding budget will support around 100 experiments with the aim of involving more than 200 SMEs and midcaps in the field of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart Systems Integration (SSI). The information and the open calls will be published on a central/common web portal for all the projects taking part in the initiative.